Links for mid Jan 2018

#109 — Biology and Culture: Sam Harris
“In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Bret Weinstein about the moral panic at Evergreen State College, the concept of race, genetic differences between human populations, intersectionality, sex and gender, “metaphorical truth,” religion and “group selection,” equality, and other topics.
Bret Weinstein has spent two decades advancing the field of evolutionary biology. He has made important discoveries regarding the evolution of cancer, senescence, and the adaptive significance of moral self-sacrifice. He is currently working to uncover the evolutionary meaning of large-scale patterns in human history, and applying evolutionary insight in the quest to prototype a liberating, sustainable anti-fragile governance structure for humanity’s next phase.”

Creative Investing, with CoVenture’s Ali Hamed – [Invest Like the Best, EP.71]
The conversation, with a 26-year old investor named Ali Hamed, serves as an example of what’s possible when you think creatively.
Ali views the world with a fresh set of eyes, and has already become an expert at identifying new investment opportunities where others have not. As the second prodigy 26 year old in as many weeks on the podcast, these young guns are making me feel like an ancient 32 year old.
We talk a lot about “alpha” in our world, earning returns better than the market. But the key word in that last sentence isn’t alpha, it’s earning. Hopefully you, like me, will use this conversation as a reminder of what it takes to earn differentiated returns. It’s not just the hard work, but also the mindset. We explore many examples of how to create new investment opportunities, from rolling up Instagram accounts, to financing perishable fruit like watermelons, to heavy machinery software.

Ep.28: Industrial Society and Its Future | Machine Intelligence, Encryption, and the Will to Power
In this episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas lays out his vision for a possible future driven by the emergent forces we have been covering in 2017. He reads passages from Ted Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and its Future,” as well as from Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” He plays clips from interviews with Barack Obama, Tim Cook, and Jamie Dimon, as he considers how power, privacy, and control, all factor into the emerging technological landscape.
What is the goal we seek to attain with our technologies? What are the benefits and the costs associated with allowing the technological, political, and economic forces of the modern age to continue unabated?

Ten years into the smartphone experiment, we may be reaching a tipping point. Buoyed by mounting evidence and a growing chorus of tech-world jeremiahs, smartphone users are beginning to recognize the downside of the convenient little mini-computer we keep pressed against our thigh or cradled in our palm, not to mention buzzing on our bedside table while we sleep.

The 3 Tricks That Made AlphaGo Zero Work
There were many advances in Deep Learning and AI in 2017, but few generated as much publicity and interest as DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero. This program was truly a shocking breakthrough: not only did it beat the prior version of AlphaGo — the program that beat 17 time world champion Lee Sedol just a year and a half earlier — 100–0, it was trained without any data from real human games. Xavier Amatrain called it “more [significant] than anything…in the last 5 years” in Machine Learning.